Home sweet home from Spring Mysteries Festival. As usual, it was an exhausting, yet fulfilling weekend.

For me, Spring Mysteries is an opportunity to spend time with my spiritual family, and to be of service. It is a a weekend full of ritual and community.

Being a part of the ritual presenting crew isn’t all glamor and accolades. There’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes. There’s a crew of people who go largely unnoticed and unrecognized, and yet, they are vital to making the event a success.

My family has been involved with both the ritual presenting and the technical crew. Tech crew works very long hours to make the ritual presenters look good.

Tech has been near to my heart for a very long time. In high school, at summer theatre, I was involved with makeup, props, and set crew long before I appeared on stage as an actor. In the university theatre program I attended, tech was a very important aspect. We were required to participate in work weekends and technical practicums. I understand and appreciate the importance of technicians.

Last year, while holding the role of Demeter, I also helped to hang and focus the lights. My eldest son was a major part of the set crew, helping with both lights and set construction. The younger two helped wherever they could.

This year, I wasn’t as involved with the setup, though my eldest sure was, even in between parts of the drama (the good kind) that he was involved in.

I did help with the tear down, though. Clean up of the site started early Sunday morning. We kept at it, other than a single meal break, until everything was put away in the storage locker at 8 pm. Many of the ritual staff and all of the crew kept at it.

They don’t always get a lot of recognition, but I saw and I honor their work. All hail the Gods of Eleusis! All hail the Tech Crew!!!

By this time, next week, the 31st annual Spring Mysteries Festival will be over. It’s hard to believe that it’s almost upon on us.

This has been the shortest rehearsal period since I’ve been involved with the ritual presenting crew. That’s because Easter is very early.

Do you know why the date for Easter changes from year to year? It is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. And this year, the stars have aligned for all of those events to happen within a week! So Easter, and therefore Spring Mysteries, is about as early as it possibly can be.

I alternately go between feeling confident that we are going to rock it out of the park, and freaking out that I have no idea what I’m doing.

That’s the nature of theater, though. Some people say that an awful dress rehearsal means a fantastic performance. And really, for 5 hours of performance time throughout the weekend, we do amazing work with only about 48 hours of rehearsals.

Each person does their own work to learn about the particular deity they are portraying – reading up on their myths, and connecting with their energy through prayer or meditation.

It’s been a little challenging for me this year, having three deities to work with. After our dress rehearsal yesterday, I was physically sore. I didn’t feel like I had done a lot – certainly not a lot of physical work. And yet, running energy for 4.5 hours is not easy! It’s hungry work, and it can take it’s toll on your body if you don’t take care of yourself.

So the next couple of days, I’m going to be taking my vitamins, drinking lots of water, and getting as much rest as I can. Because once the Festival starts, sleep is something we do AFTER Festival.

Because I will be at the Festival all weekend, I won’t be writing my usual post next week. I’ll see you all on the other side!

I have three roles this year, as do two other priestesses – together we are the Graces (Charites), the Fates (Moirae), and the Furies (Erinyes). And wow! Is there energy ever different!

The Charites were most commonly said to be daughters of Zeus (because wasn’t everyone Zeus’ progeny?), with various mothers given, though some accounts list them as daughters of Helios, Hera, or even Dionysus. They are the personification of Grace and Beauty, and were often pictured as attendants of Aphrodite or Hera.

The names and numbers of the Charites also varied. Once again, we are following the most common myths and depictions of three Graces: Euphrosyne, goddess of good cheer, joy, mirth and merriment; Aglaia, goddess of beauty, adornment, splendour and glory; and Thalia, goddess of festive celebrations and rich and luxurious banquets. They are the “hostesses with the mostesses!”

Their energy is very light and fun, almost air-headed.

The Moirae are goddesses who determined a person’s fate in life. Clotho spun the thread of life, Lachesis measured the thread of life, and Atropos cut the thread of life at its end. As with just about everyone in Greek mythology, their parentage is given differently by different authors. Zeus, of course, is given as a father of the Fates, but others credit Nyx, the goddess of night as their sole parent.

Disney depicted the Fates as sharing a single eye and tooth between them, and Percy Jackson depicted them as blind and sharing an eye, however, that description belongs to the Graiai, another set of three sisters that features in the myth of Perseus. To know a person’s fate, they must have been been able to see, and they were also known for prophecy.

The Moirae are alternately depicted as ancient and crone-like, or young and fair. Their energy is deep, and calm, and ancient.

The Erinyes were the avengers of crime, particularly murder. My favorite, and the most common, version of their parentage is that they were born of Gaia from the drops of blood that fell when Cronus castrated his father, Ouranos. That parentage makes them sisters of Aphrodite, who was born of the drops of semen that fell in the ocean and created a sea foam. Their names were Alecto, the unceasing; Tisiphone, the avenger of murder; and Megaera, she who holds a grudge.

Other versions of their birth are similar to the Fates, being born of Nyx. The Fates were often said to dispatch the Furies to avenge a crime, and thus bring a person to their rightful fate. They pursued the criminal relentlessly, often driving a person mad or inflicting illness or disease. Anyone attempting to hide a criminal would also be subject to the wrath of the Furies.

The energy of the Erinyes is angry, furious, and demanding of justice.

Though this year’s journey has a few more twists and turns for me, I’m really looking forward to it. I hope you’ll join me!

Last year a friend of mine gave me a Time-Turner for my birthday. Unfortunately, it was a toy, and not an actual working Time-Turner.

I mark the hours every one, nor have I yet outrun the Sun. My use & value unto you, are gauged by what you have to do.

For anyone who doesn’t know what a Time-Turner is, (I’m sorry you’re so sheltered!) it is a device in the Harry Potter series that allowed Hermione to attend extra classes, do all of her homework AND get some sleep by turning time backwards and allowing her to re-live the same hour twice. Oh, and she used it to save the day in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”.

As much as I might have needed a *working* Time-Turner last year, I’m wishing for one even more this year.

I’ve been stepping down from many of my commitments in the past month. This is a big deal for me. I generally want to do ALL THE THINGS. I hate having to say no. I want to experience and accomplish so much, letting any opportunity pass me by is difficult.

I was home sick for two days last week. That’s unheard of for me. Usually I’m back up and running after one day, if I even get sick at all. Even my body was telling me to slow down.

After breaking down in tears last night – again – over something that wouldn’t normally upset me that much, I had to take a closer look at myself. I could take the easy excuse and say that Demeter’s energy was affecting me. That may be part of it, and it’s not the whole picture.

The bigger picture is that I am upset with myself. I haven’t been giving ANYTHING the time and attention I would prefer. So I looked at what is really important to me and scaled back again.

I’m always amazed at how good it feels to decommit from something. I put pressure on myself to keep all these balls in the air – no one is looking down on me wondering why I’m not doing more.

Please don’t be surprised if I miss a blog post here or there over the next couple of months. I’m working on maintaining my sanity and relieving some of the pressure I have put on myself.

How about you? How are you handling your commitments? Are you putting too much pressure on yourself?

The last three months I have been pretty preoccupied. I had a dream come true, and it took most of my time outside work.

A little more than seven years ago, I was trying to connect with the Aquarian Tabernacle Church. A friend at the time was also working on that, and she was a little more persistent than I was. She talked to the head of the church, Pete Pathfinder Davis, who invited us to a festival happening over the Easter weekend.

I had an infant at that time (he was four months old at the time of the festival). She and I managed in the space of a couple of weeks to register and get ourselves to Washington state for the Spring Mysteries Festival.

Spring Mysteries Festival is a “recreation” of the Eleusinian Mysteries*. I say “recreation” because the participants were sworn to secrecy. So there is not a script or plan to follow. There are, of course, myths and ritual dramas, and some mosaics or other pieces of art that depict events.

As a Mystery tradition, the teachings have to be experienced rather than read about. The modern day Mysteries are based on the same principle. I can’t really tell you about it because my experience and the lessons that I received from the experience may be different from yours. I can tell you that the Mysteries revolve around the mythology of Demeter and Persephone’s abduction by Hades.

Me as Athena descending to talk to the mortals. And yes, I made the shield.

On the way home from that first festival experience, I told my friend that I wanted to be on the cast. I’ve been to Spring Mysteries every year since. For the first several years, I had no idea how one auditioned. In fact, I could barely remember people’s names from one year to the next. When I finally found out about the audition process, the next challenge was that the auditions and rehearsals are all held in Seattle – quite a commute from Vancouver Island. I never seemed to be able to make the trip at the time needed.

Last year at SMF we installed a new head of the church, and one of the changes that she made was that she wanted to make being on the cast to be accessible to people all over, not just those around Seattle. There was more than one opportunity to audition this year. And so I was able to be a part of the cast.

What an incredible experience it was! From getting to know other members of the cast (in brief 4-6 hour stints), to learning more about the goddess Athena and realizing that I have quite a lot in common with her, to being her Priestess for the 250+ attendees at the festival.

It was a huge commitment for me. I traveled about 450 km each way (about 6-8 hours) for a 4 hour rehearsal once every two weeks for three months. And all of it was on my own dime and my own time. I spent my own money for my costumes and items for Athena’s shrine (thankfully, there was quite a bit of stuff that was passed down from previous priestesses). And I wouldn’t have traded it or given it up for anything.

Athena in her temple

It’s taken me so long to write because I’ve been completely exhausted, and I’ve also been grieving. There’s no rehearsal this week. Or next. We came together as a family to make this amazing event happen for our community, and now the work is done. Everyone has had to go back to their normal lives. And yet we all share the memory of what we created. And I know I have grown from my experience, as a Priestess and as a person.